Archive for January, 2009
Manos: The Hands of Fate
January 6th, 2009
I consider myself something of a connoisseur of horrible movies. From Plan 9 From Outer Space to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians to Troll 2, I derive a certain masochistic joy from watching an atrocious film with a group of equally disgusted friends. One movie, however, unquestionably stands out as the worst film ever made. From the first ten minutes of watching a family drive around in the Texas countryside to the question mark at “The End?,” Manos: The Hands of Fate never ceases to appall. Let’s read some details from IMDB:
PLOT SUMMARY:
A family driving through a small town gets lost and winds up at a backwoods shack managed by Torgo, who takes care of it while The Master is away. The Master worships Manos, an evil deity, and he also wears a neat cape. When Torgo lets the family stay, The Master awakens and does mean stuff like burning off Torgo’s hand and sicking his dog on the family pet. Meanwhile, The Master’s wives wrestle for his favor.
GOOFS:
- At the beginning, when the family pulls over, and after Mike says his line, he mouths the word “Cut!”
- When Michael and his family are attacked by the snake, the stock footage of the snake was obviously filmed in broad daylight, even though the characters are surrounded by the dead of night.
- Throughout the movie, the zipper on the master’s back is clearly visible.
TRIVIA:
- Filmed entirely with a handheld camera that could only record thirty-two seconds of film at a time. The film was shot without sound; all the lines were later dubbed by only three people – two men and one woman. The little girl who plays Debbie cried when she first heard her dubbed voice.
- The real reason John Reynolds (Torgo) appears to have big knees and walks funny is because his character is supposed to be a satyr. Reynolds designed his own prosthetics to make himself look like he had goat’s feet. (Note how the wife gasps when she first looks down his feet, which the viewer does not get to see.)
- John Reynolds, who played Torgo, sustained permanent damage to his kneecaps because of the apparatus on them. He was constantly on painkillers up until his suicide, due to the injury he had from this movie. It’s believed that his kneecaps were damaged due to the device being worn backwards.
- The movie was given a gala premiere in El Paso upon its release, and many local dignitaries were on hand. Part way into the film, members of the audience began heckling it. Many of the film’s cast and crew sneaked out of the theater before the film ended to avoid the embarrassment of having to admit being part of it.
- IMDB
So if you’d like to watch a film so bad that it made the little girl who acted in it cry when she saw it, you certainly can’t do worse than Manos.
The Gävle Goat
January 4th, 2009
Since 1966, the town of Gävle in northern Sweden has yearly built a giant straw goat to celebrate Christmas. And arsonists almost yearly set the goat on fire.
The vandals and policemen engage in an annual struggle to decide whether the goat will live or die, and the vandals usually seem to win out. Here’s a timeline mentioning some of the more entertaining incidents in the goat’s history:
- 1966 Stig Gavlén came up with the idea of a giant goat made out of straw. The goat stood until 12:00 PM that New Year’s Eve, when it went up in flames.
- 1968 The goat survived. Until this year there was no fence around the goat and it was popular for children to play hide-and-seek inside and around the goat. Also, it is said that one night a couple made love inside the goat. As a result, in subsequent years the inside of the goat has been protected by a chicken-wire net.
- 1970 The goat burned down only six hours after it was assembled.
- 1971 Tired of arson, the project is abandoned. Schoolchildren build a miniature. Their little goat was kicked to pieces.
- 1972 The goat collapsed because of sabotage.
- 1976: A car crashes into the goat.
- 1979 The goat was burnt even before it was erected. A new one was built and fireproofed. It was destroyed and broken into pieces.
- 1988 Nothing happened to the goat this year, but gamblers were for the first time able to gamble on the fate of the goat with English bookmakers.
- 2006 The Southern Merchants’ goat survived New Year’s Eve and was taken down on 2 January. It is now stored in a secret location.
- Mixed together and edited with material from wikipedia and the bbc.
And, yes, the 2008 goat was also burned.
The Dymaxion Map
January 1st, 2009
Move over, Mollweide projection, I have a new favorite world map.
All maps of the globe are fundamentally flawed – there’s no way to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat map without distorting it somehow.* The best a mapmaker can do is try to minimize distortion while still keeping the map readable. Over the years dozens of projections have been designed to meet those needs.
In the 1940s, Buckminster Fuller (architect, futurist, and one of my all-time favorite people) designed the Dymaxion projection, which maps the globe onto an icosahedron and unfolds it. This spreads the distortion somewhat evenly around the globe (avoiding the “Greenland is bigger than Africa” problem) and also avoids chopping up any landmasses. Wikipedia has a really neat animation of the mapping and unfolding process.
I’d imagine you could get as little distortion as you liked by using geodesic spheres with increasing numbers of triangles, but that would involve a lot more continental division.
The Dymaxion projection is kinda similar to J.S. Cahill’s “Butterfly projection,” but his doesn’t involve a Platonic solid, so it’s clearly less wonderful (and less mathable).
* As usual, Gauss can tell you why.